Web 2.0 Expo SF 2010 Keynote Speakers

Jen Bekman, 20x200 | Jen Bekman Projects, Inc.
Founder

Jen Bekman is an art-dealer, curator, writer, and entrepreneur whose inventive approach to the art world has created new models for connecting artists and collectors. Her experience as an internet media executive informs a multi-faceted enterprise, including her eponymous Manhattan gallery (which pioneered the Lower East Side art scene upon its opening in 2003), the online endeavor 20×200 (a place to buy limited-edition fine-art prints at ridiculously affordable prices), and the international photography competition Hey, Hot Shot!

Jen Bekman’s projects have been featured in numerous international publications including, The New York Times, Art in America, Der Spiegel, Martha Stewart Living, and Wired. She frequently lectures and participates in panels about art, technology, media and marketing and is a popular portfolio reviewer at photo festivals. Her writing has appeared in GOOD Magazine and photo-eye Booklist. American Photo named her an Innovator of the Year in 2006 and she was honored with the Rising Star Award at Griffin Museum of Photography’s annual Focus Awards in 2008. 20×200 was recently named one of “America’s Most Promising Startups” by BusinessWeek.

eCommerce is a term you heard bandied around in 1997 to describe a
then-hot segment of the web. Today, well over a decade later, you
might assume that eCommerce is stable--even boring. Think again. A new
crop of start-ups is reexamining what the web can do for commerce,
invigorating the sector with smart analyses and compelling business
models.

Steve Blank, Stanford/Berkeley/Columbia
lecturer in Entrepreneurship

Put to a vote I might have been chosen “least likely to succeed” in my New York City high school class. My path has taken me from repairing fighter planes during the Vietnam War in Thailand, to spook stuff in undisclosed location(s), and I was lucky enough to arrive at the beginning of the boom times of Silicon Valley in 1978.

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies I retired in 1999. My last company, E.piphany, started in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies (Zilog and MIPS Computers), a workstation company (Convergent Technologies), a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout (Pixar), a supercomputer firm (Ardent), a computer peripheral supplier (SuperMac), a military intelligence systems supplier (ESL) and a video game company (Rocket Science Games).

Total score: two large craters (Rocket Science and Ardent), one dot.com bubble home run (E.piphany) and several base hits.

After I retired, I took some time to reflect on my experience and wrote a book (actually my class text) about building early stage companies: Four Steps to the Epiphany.
I moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that I developed in my book is one of the core themes for these classes. In 2009 I was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. The same year the San Jose Mercury News listed me as one of the 10 Influencers in Silicon Valley.

I also followed my curiosity about why entrepreneurship blossomed in Silicon Valley and was stillborn elsewhere. It has led to several talks on The Secret History of Silicon Valley.

In 2007 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed me to serve on the California Coastal Commission, the public body which regulates land use and public access on the California coast.

Paul Buchheit, Facebook

Paul Buchheit is a founder of FriendFeed, which was recently aquired by Facebook, and also an active angel investor. He was also one of the first engineers at Google, where he started Gmail, suggested the “Don’t be evil” motto, and created the first AdSense prototype. Paul has a degree in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Stewart Butterfield, Slack
Co-founder and CEO

Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and CEO of Slack, the platform for team communication which hundreds of thousands of professionals rely upon everyday. Its customer list ranges from well-known startups like Buzzfeed, Stripe and AirBnb to established giants like Adobe and PayPal.

Prior to Slack, Stewart co-founded and lead Flickr from its inception in late 2003 through its 2005 acquisition by Yahoo! and until 2008 by which point it was one of the largest web services in the world with over 50 million users and billions of photos.

In nearly two decades working on the web, Stewart has had a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist. He has been named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, BusinessWeek’s Top 50 Leaders, and been featured in interviews and articles by hundreds of publications and broadcasters including the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, and Financial Times.

When you get used to deploying code to production servers whenever the fancy strikes, it's hard to go back. And those nine-, six- or even three-month release cycles typical for MMOs start to look a little like giant bank or government IT projects.

Previously, she was the director of the Creative Systems Group (CSG) within Microsoft Research.

CSG developed several projects in the area of social computing and design, including Kodu, an Xbox 360 game to teach kids programming concepts; Salsa, a project that combines email and social networking concepts; and a project that rethinks how we view and share files within the operating system. Lili’s team also was responsible for Microsoft Research’s Design Expo and Social Computing Symposium.

Previously, Lili was director of user experience for Microsoft Windows, where from 2004 to 2006 she oversaw design, user research, user assistance and advanced development for Windows Vista.

Lili joined Microsoft in 1995, in the Virtual Worlds research group where she worked on social applications such as V-Chat and Comic Chat. She started the Social Computing Group within Microsoft Research in 2001, where the team built various social networking prototypes including Wallop (which spun out as a separate company in 2004), Photostory (which shipped in Windows), and the Sapphire project, an early vision for redesigning Windows.

Prior to Microsoft, Lili worked in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group, on the User Interface research team, where she focused on Quicktime Conferencing and Quicktime VR.

Lili is also a registered architect; she worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles for Nihon Sekkei and Skidmore Owings and Merrill on commercial urban design and large-scale building projects. She has taught at NYU-Interactive Telecommunications as well as Harvard University.

Lili was born in Tokyo, is married with three boys, and lives in Bellevue Washington.

June Cohen, TED Conferences
Executive Producer, TED.com

As Executive Producer of TED Media, I’m focused on extending TED in new directions — particularly those that help spread ideas. I led the charge to bring the conference online, launching TEDTalks in 2006, and the new TED.com in 2007. I also co-produce and co-host the annual conference, and manage our talented media team. Before TED: I developed one of the world’s first multimedia magazines in 1991, at Stanford; helped launch HotWired.com in 1994; launched Webmonkey.com in 1996; and served as Wired Digital’s VP of Content through 2000.

In 2006-- after 22 years as an exclusive, expensive event --TED began releasing talks from the conference online, for free. Rather than sinking TED's business model, this strategy of radical openness grew its audience from 1000 attendees to 150 million users worldwide, evolving the organization from an event to a global platform for spreading ideas.

Christian Coly, Parrot
Vice President of Sales

As Vice President of Sales for Parrot North America since February 2009, Christian Coly is responsible for growing the core business in North America and gaining market share across Parrot’s innovative product lines. Since 2002, Christian played a major role in Parrot’s global growth as a Sales Manager for Southern Europe, including involvement in the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian markets. In June 2006, Christian put his expertise to work in the North America market as a Technical Marketing Director for North America. He led Parrot’s launch the Certified Installer Program in the United States in October 2008, developing a national network of automotive retailers and installers throughout the U.S. Today, Christian is responsible for the North American launch of the Parrot AR.Drone leading the distribution and retail marketing as well as introducing Parrot to a new business category.

The days of multiple gadgets, devices and laptops are numbered. Today’s consumers are looking for technology that works across any platform and can control multiple devices.
Parrot North America executive, Christian Coly will address how video gaming convergence will get American families off of the couch and even outside to reinvigorate play.

Jared Friedman, Scribd
CTO & Co-Founder

Jared Friedman is Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Scribd. Jared started to build Scribd during his junior year at Harvard University by converting a dorm room closet into a data center and coding for months straight. Today, Scribd is the world’s largest social publishing and reading site with over 80 million unique readers every month. Prior to Scribd, Jared worked at Cycorp, Inc., a leader in the semantic software space specializing in artificial intelligence, and studied Computer Science at Harvard University.

Cal Henderson, Flickr
Director of Engineering

Originally from England, Cal is the VP of Engineering for Tiny Speck. Until recently he worked at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He worked on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) until April 2009 (when it was the “Official website of the Internet”).

Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

When you get used to deploying code to production servers whenever the fancy strikes, it's hard to go back. And those nine-, six- or even three-month release cycles typical for MMOs start to look a little like giant bank or government IT projects.

Ben Huh, I Can Has Cheezburger
Chief Cheezburger

Ben is a former journalist turned dot com entrepreneur who has a knack for
nailing the zeitgeist. He has been credited with bringing Internet memes to
the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of his
business is attributed to his knowledge of memes, viral content, and crowd
sourcing. Ben graduated with a BSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill
School of Journalism.

Charlie Kim, Next Jump, Inc.
CEO & Founder

Charlie Kim serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Next Jump, Inc. Mr. Kim founded Next Jump in 1994. He worked in the Information Technology and Human Resources groups of Morgan Stanley in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo from 1995 to 1997. He returned to Boston in April 1997 to grow the business full-time. To grow Next Jump from a one-person operation to a multi-layered corporation, he raised millions in independent investments from Wall Street’s most influential players. He graduated with Honors from Tufts University in 1995, where he earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Quantitative Economics.

eCommerce is a term you heard bandied around in 1997 to describe a
then-hot segment of the web. Today, well over a decade later, you
might assume that eCommerce is stable--even boring. Think again. A new
crop of start-ups is reexamining what the web can do for commerce,
invigorating the sector with smart analyses and compelling business
models.

Kevin Lynch, Adobe
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President

As chief technology officer and senior vice president, Experience & Technology Organization, Kevin Lynch oversees Adobe’s experience design and core technology across business units. This role includes driving Adobe’s technology platform for designers and developers across desktops and devices, including Adobe® Flash® Player, Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe Flex® and Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the web. He also oversees Adobe’s developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Prior to being named CTO in 2008, Lynch served as senior vice president and chief software architect for Adobe’s Platform Business Unit. Lynch joined Adobe through the company’s 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, Inc., where he served as chief software architect and president of product development. He headed up the creation of the company’s mobile and devices group and served as general manager of the web publishing group. Lynch also oversaw the initial development of Macromedia® Dreamweaver®, a leading web development product.

Before joining Macromedia in 1996, Lynch worked for General Magic, where he pioneered a navigational user interface for handheld communicators. Previously, he designed the user interface and developed the first Macintosh release of FrameMaker® software for Frame Technology, later acquired by Adobe. While at the University of Illinois, Lynch developed early Macintosh applications, including a desktop publishing program that introduced user interface elements in common use today.

Lynch holds three patents with others currently pending, and he is involved in Adobe’s international standards efforts with organizations such as the W3C, ECMA and ISO. Lynch studied interactive computer graphics at the University of Illinois, working with artists and engineers in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

Hilary Mason, Accel Partners
Data Scientist in Residence

Hilary Mason is founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, and data scientist in residence at Accel Partners. Previously Hilary was chief scientist at Bitly. She co-hosts DataGotham, a conference for New York’s home-grown data community, and co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that helps engineering students find opportunities in New York’s creative technical economy. Hilary served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology Advisory Board, and is a member of Brooklyn hacker collective NYC Resistor.

A vibrant ecosystem has grown up around streaming content. What does this content look like? Do people consume it differently? How does it spread? How is it being exploited? We've taken a deep look at the mechanisms of content sharing through the facets of social streams and the ways that content and behavior are evolving in this new environment.

Erin McKean, Wordnik
Founder

Erin McKean is the founder of the newly-not-for-profit Wordnik.com, the world’s biggest online dictionary. Before founding Wordnik, she was the editor-in-chief of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and before Javascript, she dabbled in HyperCard, Perl, and Omnimark (if you have ever written anything in Omnimark, she will buy you a drink). She’s the author of the Weird and Wonderful Words books, the best-selling novel The Secret Lives of Dresses, and (most recently) The Hundred Dresses, a field guide to dresses. She blogs at dressaday.com. When you meet her, please tell her your favorite word.

Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Founder and CEO

Tim has a history of convening conversations that reshape the industry. In 1998, he organized the meeting where the term “open source software” was agreed on, and helped the business world understand its importance. In 2004, with the Web 2.0 Summit, he defined how “Web 2.0” represented not only the resurgence of the web after the dot com bust, but a new model for the computer industry, based on big data, collective intelligence, and the internet as a platform. In 2009, with his “Gov 2.0 Summit,” he framed a conversation about the modernization of government technology that has shaped policy and spawned initiatives at the Federal, State, and local level, and around the world. He has now turned his attention to implications of the on-demand economy and other technologies that are transforming the nature of work and the future shape of the business world. He is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). He is also a founder and board member at Maker Media, which spun out of O’Reilly Media in 2012, and a board member at Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox.

Jeff Pierce manages the mobile computing research group at IBM Research – Almaden. Prior to joining IBM Research in 2006, he served time as an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There he led the Personal Information Environments research group and co-directed the Adaptive Personalized Information Environments lab with Charles Isbell. His current research concentrates on understanding and supporting interaction that spans multiple personal computing devices (including smartphones, but also desktops, laptops, and other devices). In addition to having his research appear in numerous conference proceedings, journals, and books, he also shared the honor of being Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2006.

Eric Ries, Lessons Learned
Venture Advisor

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller “The Lean Startup” and the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned.

He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. In 2007, BusinessWeek named him one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. In 2009, he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has consulted to new and established companies as well as venture capital firms. He is currently serving as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and a Fellow for IDEO, the design consulting firm.

His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.

Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs
Author, The Facebook Era and CEO

Clara helped kick off the Social CRM movement in 2007 with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM. She is author of the newly released bestseller, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff about Facebook and Twitter for business, which has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, CRM Magazine, and is being used as a textbook at Stanford and Harvard Business School.

Clara recently left her position as Product Line Director of the AppExchange at salesforce.com to found Hearsay Labs, which provides social media tools enabling sales, marketers, and IT to manage customer engagements across Facebook, Twitter, and their own websites. Clara has also worked at Google and Microsoft, and holds degrees in computer science, economics, and internet studies from Stanford and Oxford. Clara blogs at http://thefacebookera.com and Twitters as @clarashih.

Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare, Inc.
Cofounder & CEO

Rashmi Sinha is cofounder and CEO for SlideShare, the world’s largest professional sharing site. SlideShare is growing rapidly (more than 28 million monthly uniques) letting everyone from marketers, speakers and educators share and connect with others.

Before SlideShare, Rashmi cofounded another startup – MindCanvas – a gamelike survey platform. Rashmi has a PhD from Brown University and
has experience working with search engines and recommender systems at UC Berkeley. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Web
2.0 Expo and Future of Web Apps. She writes a blog at rashmisinha.com about running a startup and social software.

Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
Editor In Chief

Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.

Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.

Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.

Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief, which covers all aspects of search marketing and search engine news. Danny also serves as Third Door Media’s chief content officer, which owns Search Engine Land and the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. Danny also maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter: @dannysullivan.

Are search engines content "vampires" that should be feared, sucking content
owners dry and providing little value in return? Or do they operate well
within "fair use" and provide far more reward to content owners than
traditional media outlets do?

Rebecca Thorman, Alice.com
PR & Communications

Rebecca manages community and PR at the start-up company Alice.com in Madison, Wisconsin. Alice.com is changing the way consumers shop for and purchase Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) like toilet paper, and provides eCommerce and interactive marketing services exclusively to the CPG industry. The company’s eCommerce platform allows CPG manufacturers to create branded storefronts that make it easy for the mainstream consumer to buy all of their household goods online. Alice has been featured on CNN, Rachael Ray, The Today Show, and more, due in large part to Alice.com’s social media efforts. The Alice co-founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have an entrepreneur track-record that includes three previous start-up successes including their last company Jellyfish.com which sold to Microsoft. Rebecca’s favorite brand of toilet paper is Cottonelle.

eCommerce is a term you heard bandied around in 1997 to describe a
then-hot segment of the web. Today, well over a decade later, you
might assume that eCommerce is stable--even boring. Think again. A new
crop of start-ups is reexamining what the web can do for commerce,
invigorating the sector with smart analyses and compelling business
models.

Ge Wang is the Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule (a.k.a. SonicMule, Inc.), a developer of interactive sonic media. Smule’s mission is to intensely explore expressive audio, enabling creativity for a wide population and new social interactions. Smule’s bestselling iPhone apps include I Am T-Pain, Leaf Trombone World Stage and Ocarina. Concurrently, Dr. Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He is the chief-architect and co-creator of the ChucK audio programming language, and the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO).